Mamacita says: I’m tired of reading about dishonor. Today’s Quotation Saturday focuses on HONOR – a trait many people have turned their backs on in favor of . . . other, more selfish and self-serving traits.
1. Honor isn’t about making the right choices. It’s about dealing with the consequences. –Midori Koto
2. Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud. — Sophocles
3. He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. –Walter Lippman
4. Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong. — Thomas Jefferson
5. The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor. –George Bernard Shaw
6. Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them. –Aristotle
7. The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. — Socrates
8. One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them. –Thomas Sowell
9. Honor is simply the morality of superior men. –H.L. Mencken
10. There are people who observe the rules of honor as we observe the stars: from a distance. –Victor Hugo
11. No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave. –Calvin Coolidge
12. Those who give, hoping to be rewarded with honor, are not giving, they are bargaining. –Philo Judaeus
13. You meet the warrior when in battle, but it is not until victory that you meet the gentleman. — Jacinto Benavente
14. Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people. — Wendell L. Willkie
15. Honor sinks where commerce long prevails. — Oliver Goldsmith
16. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught. –H.L. Mencken
17. Don’t look for more honor than your learning merits. — Jewish proverb
18. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. — Lois McMaster Bujold
19. Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. — Lois McMaster Bujold
20. The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
21. Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are. –Thomas
Carlyle
22. You should consider an employment change before you consider selling out. –Phillip C. McGraw
23. It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. –Mark Twain
24. Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honor, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means. –Charles Dickens
25. It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. –Niccolo Machiavelli
26. A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. –George Bernard Shaw
27. The sense of honour is of so fine and delicate a nature, that it is only to be met with in minds which are naturally noble, or in such as have been cultivated by good examples, or a refined education. –Joseph Addison
28. Honor is not the exclusive property of any political party. –Herbert Hoover
29. Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. –W.H. Auden
30. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. –C.S. Lewis
31. Fame is something that must be won. Honor is something that must not be lost. –Arthur Schopenhauer
32. Better not be at all than not be noble. –Alfred, Lord Tennyson
33. He who has lost honour can lose nothing more. –Publilius Syrus
34. Society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases. –John Adams
35. Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth. –Aesop
36. Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.–Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
37. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated. –Saul Bellow
38. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. –Edmund Burke
39. Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. –Chinese proverb
40. While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny. –Rev. Nicholas Collin
41. To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing it’s best, night and day, to make you like everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. –e.e. cummings
42. The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded. –C. L. De Montesquieu
43. The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. –Frederick Douglass
44. Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them. –Dwight D. Eisenhower
45. We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games. –Lou Erickson
46. He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief. –Dr. Thomas Fuller
47. The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. –Gandhi
48. Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. –Goethe
49. The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. –Dr. Samuel Johnson
50. It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably. –Kant
51. Nearly all men can withstand adversity; if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.–Abraham Lincoln
52. When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest. –Abraham Lincoln
53. None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants. — John Milton
54. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. –P.J. O’Rourke
55. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. –Theodore Roosevelt
56. The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it. — Gen. H. Norman Schwartzkopf
57. We know what a person thinks, not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions. –Isaac Bashevis Singer
58. We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, ‘…we shouldn’t have done that.’ We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, ‘We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.’ –Bishop Desmond Tutu
59. There is such thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. –Woodrow Wilson
60. When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity.–Ben Jonson
Etc. Again, I stop only because I force myself to stop.
Other people can always say “it” so much better than I could. I am swept off my feet by a good turn of phrase.
Honor. Wouldn’t it be nice if it came back into style?